I calibrated the Dirac Live within an Arcam AVR 850 for an Essex based customer as a huge part of their dedicated home cinema which featured 5.1 Artcoustic Speakers and Subwoofer, JVC X7900 Projector with an Oppo 205 as the main source. This is a really lovely room and blended a personalised high performance home cinema with a very homely feeling.
The challenge of this calibration as with most setups was the bass, I started by taking measurements all around the room to see where the best main listening spot might be but ended up leaving it where it was as it measured the most well suited. The front speakers and subwoofer are all discrete and hidden behind the projector screen and probably largely due to the subwoofers location the bass extension was not where it would ideally be.
It took me about 6 hours to calibrate this system because I wanted to still give the customer as much bass impact as possible while retaining a totally cohesive sound stage and outright bass clarity and control. This is often a fine line at the best of times but very much so in this situation.
I was able to achieve a pretty outstanding overall end result with this system, the music side of the system was transformed from something that was ok to a huge sized musical presentation that was harmonically rich sweet and very full and dynamic in the bass. For movies the sound for the very most part was excellent again big, clear very sweet and rich with bass of detail, excitement and more. A job very well done.
Customer Feedback
The main reason to go with a pro, was I felt I had neither the patience, nor the real desire so I was ultimately happy to take the risk and pay a little bit more than for a mic I would never likely use and following his visit yesterday, I’m so glad I did. In short, he spent somewhere around 6 hours fine-tuning and tweaking with the long and short of it being I have never heard my set up sound so good!
I can see why some people like to tweak but I just want it to sound as best it can and boy does it.
I can also agree that Terry by his own admission says he has learnt so much since he first started but he is a real perfectionist when it comes to Dirac and won’t leave until he/you are happy.